It went from backpacking gear to survival gear. The city is talking about shutting all the water off. I have 10 gallons of water on hand but if I need more I can filter water out of the lake in front of my house. For all the other backpackers here living in Houston please stay safe!!

It went from backpacking gear to survival gear. The city is talking about shutting all the water off. I have 10 gallons of water on hand but if I need more I can filter water out of the lake in front of my house. For all the other backpackers here living in Houston please stay safe!!

Best wishes to you and all your fellow soggy residents!

p.s. Assume all floodwater is contaminated with chemical as well as biological hazards unless you know otherwise (if it came off your roof, for example).

If you have a tub, fill it and remember you can drain the water from the water heater.

Good to be prepared and if you have backpacking gear you're always a big step towards that.

I hope the water has began to recede a bit for you. I was poking around the NOAA site a few days before Harvey started hitting the coast and saw a video from a satellite and it was just amazing how huge it got, but the news didn't seem to be mentioning it much until it had just a couple days before the eye of the storm was about to hit the coast, which surprised me.

My sister, who lives near Dallas, said they had a huge rush on gasoline there on Thursday. Said they sold 40,000 gallons and had 18 pumps running non-stop until they ran out.

She said they taped signs over the "Regular" gas buttons because the tanks were down to 1000 gallons and when they're that low the gas gets all mucked up with sediment, but people were tearing off the signs and still pumping gas from them into their big expensive trucks. That's certainly gonna cost of few of them more than it was worth.

The photos and videos I've seen show some pretty devastating results. I know from some experience it's easy to make it look worse than it is, but it sure looks bad from what I've seen.